The device, which costs around $1,500, will hit the market on October 25
Meta, parent company of Facebook, unveiled its new advanced virtual and mixed reality glasses Quest Pro. The device, which costs about $1,500, will hit the market on October 25, offering consumers the ability to interact with colorful virtual worlds that will blend with the real world around them.
The announcement is a major step for the head of the largest social network, Mark Zuckerberg, who since last year has announced his ambitious plan to transform Facebook from a social media company to a metaverse company.
To this end, it has already invested billions of dollars, notably in Meta’s Loyalty Labs unit responsible for making the metaverse a reality. The unit had a 2021 loss of $10.2 billion and has lost nearly $6 billion so far this year, according to Reuters.
Speaking – sometimes as a videotaped person and sometimes as an avatar – at Meta’s annual Connect conference, where the new Quest Pro device was unveiled, the Zuckerberg stated that the blending of the physical and digital worlds will give rise to new uses of computing. “You’re going to see whole new categories of things being created,” he said.
THE Quest Pro is an upgrade to Meta’s existing Quest 2, which already dominates the consumer VR market.
Among other things, the new device has a high-resolution color camera that looks out and captures the surrounding environment in 3D, then enabling e.g. hanging a virtual painting on a real room wall or seeing a virtual ball bounce on a real table.
The Quest Pro glasses they’re thinner and lighter than the Quest 2s (which cost around $400 today), with the battery now placed on the back of the device so that its weight is better distributed.
It also has sensors that look towards the user and reproduce their eye movements and facial expressions, creating a sense that the user’s digital “avatar” is communicating more naturally with people (who may be on the other end land).
Meta is promoting the new device as a productivity tool, suitable for designers, architects and other creative professionals or artists. Furthermore, the company will proceed, in collaboration with Microsoft, to create within 2023 virtual versions of the programs Word, Outlook and Teams, promoting the goal of interoperability (communication and cooperation of different systems), a key demand in an open metaverse.
Meta is still working on developing a mixed reality experience called Magic Rooms, as part of its broader Horizon Workrooms application, where a person’s avatar (the digital persona) will appear present in a real conference room, along with other body users. She also plans to add legs to her avatars, which so far only appear from the waist up.
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